[Creative Nonfiction] A Small Light

Read the winning entry for our week of October 20, 2024 prompt, Nature Observed.

A Small Light
by Bethany Joy Dawson

I have carried your thorn in my pocket for a week. It is the length of my finger, with four tight buds and bark like a grandmother’s skin. There is a tiny scar on the branch from which it came; no-one would notice unless they knew you well, unless they studied your sharp profile against the ever changing sky. To carry your thorn is to hold the tension between wound and healing; you are all the medicine I need.

I lie here, in circle with your kin, and I am enchanted. Bees visit the yarrow and field scabious beside me, mushrooms nose the soft wet earth and your berries glow like a lantern in the dawn. If I were to pull back the covers, this thick layer of grass and sheep sorrel, I would see the cashel remains, the huge boulders holding my ancestor’s bones, and the place of ceremony over which you presided for centuries. If I dug deeper, I would trace your roots like a map to the place where your sisters grow strong. Who planted you in a ring like this? What did they know that I do not? Deeper still and I’d reach the heart of the hill, where water has carved a space through the limestone. Can you hear it whisper as it flows from the mountain of the sleeping giant to the lake beyond?

I come aground. Your branches are whipped by the prevailing wind to resemble a creature reaching. You pine for something west of here, across the circle, beyond your grasp. I follow your line of sight to the ocean where ships once set sail for Quebec loaded with starving people, and ships once set sail for England loaded with all our food. Beyond that, Maeve’s tomb is all rubble heaped on Knocknarea - do you yearn for our wild, warrior Queen? It is more likely you miss the forests that once stretched between here and there, your clan felled before your eyes.

Sunlight filters through your crown and the lichen flares, radioactive on your skeleton, an ancient reminder of our source. Now that you are bare, I see the nest you cradled. I guess blackbird or bullfinch, and marvel that in all my hours of observation, I failed to notice this miracle.

The light reaches me and I am beheld: a scrap of muscle and bone stretched out on a blanket, here today, gone tomorrow.

Yet I, too, burn.

In the context of your thickening trunk, your tangle of branch, the May flowers, these ripe berries, my life is the thorn: quick, needle-thin, then plucked for the pocket of the next brokenhearted.

Teach me, therefore, how to be here, how to belong, like hawthorn on a hill. 

A Note From Our Judge,

Lindsey Trout Hughes

This piece reads like an offering, filled a quiet reverence. Each line draws us close to the intimacy of land and lineage. The sensory detail is lovely—each thorn, root, and branch holds both the weight of history and a personal ache. 

About Bethany Joy Dawson

Bethany Joy Dawson

is the author of My Father's House and her nature writing has been featured in journals such as Bumble, Freckle and The Green Parent. She lives in the wild west of Ireland and is currently working on her next novel. You can find her work on Substack @bethanyjoydawson.

This piece was written in response to the prompt Nature Observed.